Over the last decade, South America has become home to a number of incredibly successful type foundries. One such foundry is Untype, an independent type foundry and studio established by Sergio Leiva Whittle and Rodrigo López Fuentes in 2017.
Based in Santiago, Chile, Untype focuses on crafting typefaces that are not only well-designed but provide designers with extensive multilingual support and versatility through OpenType features. When it comes to the needs of contemporary graphic designers, particularly those who often work on design projects that must reach an international audience, those are important characteristics for any successful type design.
Rodrigo and Sergio both have an extensive background in typography and graphic design. Even before he ever set foot in a university, Rodrigo had been working in the printing business since the age of 12. Over the years that have passed since those early days, he’s worked with a number of artists and graphic designers on various projects and also through the classes he’s conducted at several schools, institutes, and universities.
Sergio has been working in graphic design for branding and editorial agencies for eight years, and he’s also taken on bespoke type projects for international clients. Largely self-taught in the art of typeface design, Sergio is actually a former student of Rodrigo’s and that’s kind of how they came together to establish Untype Foundry.
Continuing with the foundry’s goal of creating high-quality type designs that suit a broad range of applications, one of Untype’s more recent releases through YouWorkForThem is Axios. This geometric and humanist sans serif was designed to explore the beauty and simplicity of classic geometric sans serifs while also balancing the influence of humanist calligraphy. It may sound like a strange brew but the result is a type design that’s minimalist and modern, yet carries the warmth of traditional humanist detailing.
Axios balances both form and function through letters whose architecture lends itself to high legibility and clarity, especially through long passages of text. This is a beautiful sans serif that was designed to be versatile through a range of weights that include Thin, ExtraLight, Light, Regular, Medium, Bold, Extra Bold, Black, and Heavy, with corresponding italics for each. With that in mind, Axios is built for everything from signage and displays to headlines, editorials, publishing, letterhead, corporate correspondence, white papers, infographics, presentations, advertising, web copy, mobile applications, product packaging, package inserts, magazines and periodicals, branding, identity, and logo design.
When it comes to OpenType features, Axios is crazy-loaded with them, offering contextual alternates, capitals to small caps, numerators, denominators, fractions, ordinals, subscript, superscript, oldstyle figures, tabular figures, discretionary ligatures, standard ligatures, small caps, and stylistic alternates for incredible versatility.
Its multilingual support is impressive, too, covering Basic Latin, Western European, Euro, Catalan, Baltic, Turkish, Central European, Romanian, Pan African Latin, Afrikaans, Igbo Onwu, and Basic Greek for exceptional accessibility in international design projects.
Untype currently offers just three products through YouWorkForThem but we are really looking forward to seeing more of their work in the future. Visit their portfolio to view the rest of their work and check back often to catch their new releases!
